Gagarin Revisited

Tuesday is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic space flight. To mark the occasion, a groundbreaking biography of the space pioneer, published for the first time in the United States this month by Walker & Company, was recently excerpted in our men’s issue. Here, one of the book’s authors, Jamie Doran, revisits Gagarin’s legacy.

Imagine, just for a moment, that Yuri Gagarin had been born in the United States.

HBO would be competing for audiences with two or maybe three blockbuster Hollywood movies; streets or space facilities would be renamed, memorabilia on sale at every corner; 50th anniversary specials would appear in every sane magazine along with the usual raft of conspiracy theories in the insane, beginning with National Enquirer. And Yuri, had he been alive, would have loved every second of it.

I can’t truly say that my impression of Gagarin has changed perceptibly since the film was first made and the book published (in Britain in 1998). I always liked him and I still do. But what has most certainly changed is the recognition given to him and those amazing scientists for their spectacular achievement using what could only be described as extremely rudimentary technology, pushing the envelope far beyond that which anyone at the time believed possible.

Yuri was certainly a man of the world, in every sense, and I think it’s in this vein that my impression has solidified rather than changed. Here was a son of a peasant, shot into the spotlight in more ways than one, who took it in stride and, for too short a period, became a global enigma — a Soviet with a smile on his face.

No longer the dour, threatening faces atop Lenin’s mausoleum; here was a genuinely happy man whose unadulterated warmth touched everyone he came into contact with, including quite a few female fans whom he probably shouldn’t have come into contact with at all.

He was, quite simply, loved by one and all — including, eventually, even his greatest rivals — and it’s this impression that never leaves me.

I’m the son of an old Commie; a die-hard Soviet supporter who found it possible to turn a blind eye to some of the more shocking excesses of that ugly regime on the basis that it served as a counterweight to what he saw as American imperialism. I can never forget his enormous pride following the announcement of Gagarin’s successful flight. As for myself, this 5-year-old went straight outside to sit on the steps of our home in Glasgow and stare at the sky. And yes, even to this day, I swear that I spotted the shiny little capsule as it made its way around our Earth (even though it had completed its journey long, long before).

After ‘witnessing’ this historic moment, I stepped back indoors just in time to hear my father boldly proclaiming that the first country to land a man on the Moon would rule the world, so certain was he that it would be the USSR. (When, eight years later, I reminded him of this claim after a fellow called Armstrong had planted his feet on the ‘Big Cheese’, as we used to call it, he vehemently denied saying this, claiming that my hearing was surely impaired that day: “I didn’t say the Moon”, he protested, “I said Mars.”)

What is truly extraordinary about Gagarin is that he became one of the very, very few (actually, I can’t think of any others presently) Soviet icons who kept his heroic status after the Berlin Wall fell, leading to a change in personnel at the Kremlin. He is as much a hero to present-day Russians as he was to their parents and grandparents.

But Yuri himself, whom I sometimes got the impression put up with the adulation simply as it served as a vehicle towards another free glass of vodka or the undying admiration of yet another rather attractive young lady, would be the first to point out who the true hero of that era was. He was known only as the “Chief Designer,” his real name never publicly acknowledged due to the obsession with secrecy.

Sergei Korolev had become a father-figure to Cosmonaut No 1. In 1966, as Yuri sat by his deathbed listening intently to tales of his often tough life (including six years in the Gulag), he knew that Korolev’s plans to beat the United States and be the first to land a man on the Moon were already being implemented. But without the great man at the helm, those plans soon fell into disarray. Had a tumor not suddenly snuffed out possibly the greatest scientific mind the Soviet Union had ever produced, perhaps my father’s initial proclamation would have come true and even Hollywood would have had to take notice.